So this little test album, where every image should be downloadable, if you want to look at the full res -
https://goo.gl/photos/oxev1W89Mxc3kkuH7
Every set of images is a jpg from DNG conversion, followed by a jpg as captured by the drone....
Sometimes I like DNG, sometimes i like JPG, but in dark condition (and I did run dngclean) the dark surfaces look very much made out of gray, black, red, brown dots.. quite pixalated.....
Thoughts on improvement on the DJI itself? Good things to do to these in photoshop? I just got the  photoshop subscription, but I am finding that I am not very good at working it yet, and i mainly use raw camera editor from photoshop bridge.....

Just wondering what can you guys suggest to make things better!

I may add some adjusted images, and will mark them as postprocessed with a comment in the album..... see how well I do ;)

Thx!

What are you using to generate the JPG from the DNG?
You should be able to get everything out of the DNG that exists in the JPG. Think of the DNG as your negative and the JPG as your final print. The DNG contains more information than the JPG.

Also, you will always have greater noise on low light images. You are just seeing the noise because the DNG allows you to. If you adjust the brightness, contrast and gamma to make the DNG image appear like the JPG then that noise should be no more apparent in the result than it does in the JPG.

Maybe it's the gamma that I am missing, let me see...  I used Total Image Converter for this case, but if I wanted to modify dng well, i'd do photoshop raw camera - I think that's whatit's called.. it's a plugin in Photoshop that i can get to from Bridge....
And I agree, I should be able to get to same place as dji jpg, but had no luck with that on most night pics....
I guess I am looking at guidance from others as well as conformation that the pictures themselves are taken ok, just lack post-processing.. Let me see if I can add a few actual DNGs to the album.. this way perhaps some pro can download it, process it, and give me a bit of info on how the right result was achieved....

Phantomski Posted at 2016-11-16 11:40
Maybe it's the gamma that I am missing, let me see...  I used Total Image Converter for this case, b ...

Night shots are tricky. I think a lower ISO and longer shutter will help with the noise. I always shoot DNG and JPG simultaneously. You could try mult-shot (AEB) and do an HDR merge to get better dynamic range and then just adjust your blacks threshold to kill the noise in the really dark areas.

I usually try 100-200ISO but once the shots need to be above 1s, i start increasing the ISO.. here it got a bit windy, so i was trying to keep it well below 1 sec...  some pics came out quite nice, some not so much... when jpg comes out well, i just keep it....  i will add a handful of the better ones later, where even the jpg is not too dark.... I think my biggest pain is that even in photoshop, i cannot get my jpg made out of dng look as good as the jpg from phantom.. yes, i also record both formats. I have found that when shooting hdr, the dng is pretty bad and corrupt with red dots...  did not try bracketing.. not sure if 3 advanced has that.. maybe it's a 3 pro thing, or p4?
Again, cannot test it without powering everything on, because go app will not even let you look at photo settings unless the connection is hot....
Flying during this session, most of my images were shot at 400iso, approaching 1 sec shutter. No manual modification of ev.

I suggest using Adobe Lightroom to work with the DNG (or any RAW file...) it allows non destructive editing and can be purchased as a standalone product or part of Adobes Creative Cloud.

And no, I don't work for Adobe.  I just happen to really like Lightroom for processing raw files (you can try it free for 30 days IIRC, play around with it).

I use LightRoom for processing RAW photos. You should easily be able to make an image from a RAW file look better than any in-camera JPG (same image capture).

well, i am beginning to notice that the utility i originally got for converting dng to jpg actually does not do a very good job lately.. something has happened.. so yes, i think i have to get into the manual mode of converting dng files into jpg myself... weird! But clearly that is what most people who use dng do....
BTW, why is your avatar so close to mine?! I got confused for a sec there!

Phantomski Posted at 2016-11-17 17:44
well, i am beginning to notice that the utility i originally got for converting dng to jpg actually  ...

I tend to doubt the value of a 'utility' to convert DNG to JPG. A DNG file is a digital negative in effect and needs to be processed to bring out the best result from it. The idea behind DNG is that the camera does not do any processing of the image, leaving it to you to do that work. Therefore you really should be importing it into a program like Lightroom or Photoshop and 'developing' it there. It is not an easy task, but there are many tutorials on the subject that will help you get the best out of your DNG shot.